Awesome prototype presentation and immediately felt like a glimpse of the future.
1,649 karma · joined October 16, 2011
The first one was someone proving another conjecture false by just repeatedly saying "keep going" to ChatGPT: https://x.com/DmitryRybin1/status/2079904005652893709
What a world we live in.
Really interested in seeing how it fares in reality, almost sounds too good to be true.
There's probably a lot more interesting info hiding behind that statement. If housing is massively unaffordable (as it in the UK), social mobility is rather low, why go out there and destroy yourself in low wage jobs?
Not saying there's no spoiled youth waiting for their lottery ticket that will never come, but there's a rational aspect to it as well.
There are a few things to keep in mind, some of them you've already argued yourself. One, Engage is a common word, so that's on you, and two, more importantly, in today's SEO/ASO/other algorithmic wars, if you truly are the leader in this space, people will copy as much of your name/branding as possible to steal your customers' attention.
You are absolutely not in a unique position in this regard, if you want evidence, look at this top 50 generative AI mobile apps ranking: https://isarta.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-6-1.... Count the amount of Chat + "something" names, and the amount of practically identical logos as ChatGPT in addition. That's the game these days, if you are successful, you will be copied relentlessly.
And the copycats might not even be copycats in the sense you're thinking. Automated customer engagement, LinkedIn or otherwise, is probably among the top 3 ideas that came to mind to anyone working in the sales/CRM space as soon as LLMs became convincingly human in conversation. So it's just thousands of people realizing the same opportunity at roughly the same time, going out to build it, maybe checking if there's a significant player in the space already, learning from their mistakes, copying the parts that made sense, and firing on all cylinders to become the leader in the space.
Yes, someone with more money might even beat you to the #1 spot, and the people who you think are your competitors right now might not even be relevant in a year, when various CRM companies build this functionality into their systems as a feature. In an even worse scenario, companies like Persana might be acquired with way worse numbers than you have, because of the network, the budget, the lower risk due to being ex-LinkedIn, etc.
None of this is particularly "fair" in the school playground sense of the word, but rarely anything is in business. If you have a true competitive advantage in terms of product, you have better odds than most, but maybe someone is going to beat you on distribution, pricing, marketing, targeting, to the point that product will barely matter.
It's on you to figure out what you want to focus on, and what outcome you will be happy with. If you have the metrics, you can probably fundraise easily. You might not want to, because you want to bootstrap, but then stop wasting energy on thinking about competitors who are doing it differently. Whatever choices you make, make them, and focus on your own path.
I do agree with the article's author's other premise, radiology was one of those fields that a lot of people (me included) have been expecting to be largely automated, or at least the easy parts, as the author mentions, and that the timelines are moving slower than expected. After all, pigeons perform similarly well to radiologists: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4651348/ (not really, but it is basically obligatory to post this article in any radiology themed discussion if you have radiology friends).
Knowing medicine, even when the tech does become "good enough", it will take another decade or two before it becomes the main way of doing things.
Not everything has this trajectory, and it took 10 years more than expected. But it's coming.
Not saying AI will be the same, but underestimating the impact of having certain outputs 100x cheaper, even if many times crappier seems like a losing bet, considering how the world has gone so far.
- Nonprofit business model does not equal "everything is free for the user forever", I'm guessing you already know that, but the wording on why you don't believe in nonprofit business models explicitly mentioned keeping everything free as the reason. You can earn revenue from users in a nonprofit business.
- You have a big audience with good engagement for the segment, there are multiple ways to make money without abandoning the core mission (job boards, screencast upsells for advanced courses, premium content, whatever else, look at how Remoteok.com makes money, copy-paste as the founder is super open on his process)
- Being a for-profit business and fundraising, will temporarily solve your issue of having funds to run a business. It will not solve the issue of not knowing how to/being afraid to charge users or other parties for the value they get out of your product. You could already be solving this problem today, and you have a 2million audience pipeline built in to solve that issue.
I'm not dismissing the challenge of some business segments being extremely difficult to make money in despite the value being meaningful, I work in healthcare, so I know, but since your new business will effectively be in the same segment, do focus on the revenue aspect much sooner and much than you think you'll need to, because you already know what happens if you don't.
And big respect for what you've built in a super crowded space, you obviously have the product and user empathy chops needed, wishing you the best of luck on nailing the business chops!
No, you throw it away, and probably won't buy it again. If you don't like NYT, don't buy from them.
If NYT is like an avocado for you, sometimes ripe and delicious, sometimes unripe, sometimes rotten, you get to decide how often you're gonna buy avocados, or if you'll develop your own methods of avocado testing before buying to increase your odds. In no case do you get to take the avocado skin back to the store asking for a refund.
Time-stamped to that part of the podcast, roughly 2 minutes of relevant answer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg&t=2613
The part that feels most like the advice above: "And same thing what happens with nutrition and fitness or something, same thing happens in developing. They pay this influencer to promote this stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo products with it, and then a lot of people are like, “Wow, use this.” And I started noticing this, because when I would ship my stuff, people would ask me, “What are you using?” I would say, “Just PHP, jQuery. Why does it matter?”
And people would start attacking me like, “Why are you not using this new technology, this new framework, this new thing?”
From that perspective, Trump loves money, loves deregulation, and will open the door for whatever dystopian play if it provides enough benefits to him, so it only makes sense for him to be more favoured.
All that will come from this will be more evidence to how power corrupts everyone, and a lot of money made.
(Just something I've wondered since sunglasses are super prevalent)
It was of course way cheaper than any reasonable electric car 2 years ago too, still probably is, and charging infrastructure was terrible where I live back then, still mostly is (but getting better).
I think the years and years of PR around their top tier reliability helps a lot too. I guess the biggest gripe is the looks of their cars, they're basically boring, kind of ugly and utilitarian. But all of the above together kind of nails a segment of car buyers which is "I don't want to give a shit about my car, I need it to work well, not burn the planet too much, not cost a lot, and get me where I need to go", which is probably a pretty large segment.
I can easily see from an employee's perspective, they could react like you, "why the hell am I doing page speed shit, we're already fine, this is bullshit". Especially because the entire field of SEO sounds like total random guesswork to a lot of engineers. But I expect the team to have the common sense not to completely fuck up the product in the mean time and/or fake results, even if the metric we're measuring and improving is page speed. I don't think that's an OKR issue, that's just not giving a shit issue that no management approach can solve (on both sides, since the management spent no time explaining why page speed is important to improve).
- Using your voice to send an email, video or audio message. You can still make calls and send text messages - Rescheduling an event in Google Calendar with your voice. You can still schedule a new event. - Asking to take certain actions by voice, such as send a payment, make a reservation, or post to social media. You can still ask Assistant to open your installed apps. - Asking to meditate with Calm. You can still ask for meditation options with media providers such as YouTube.
All of these seem to fall under the umbrella of "features that actually make the assistant an assistant"/connecting the assistant to other apps, which I imagine is exactly the opposite of where the Assistant trend is going, especially with LLMs. Just speaking to a device about which action you want to take and not needing to think which app you need to open and navigate feels like the UX of the future, whatever this is seems like the opposite.
The US GOVERNMENT (not the US as a whole) spent more on health care ($1.8 trillion) to provide non-universal healthcare than 6 European countries with a combined population similar to the US did ($1.2 trillion) to provide universal healthcare.
The article's premise being, it costs the government significantly more per person, and 50% more in total to run a non-universal healthcare system serving a subset of the population, than it does a universal healthcare system which covers everyone.
As a whole, the US spent $4.5 trillion (private+public).
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?locat...
There's legal precedent already in Europe that this is fine by GDPR rules, as long as the price of the subscription is "reasonable".
That way they get to preserve (or even improve) their ad targeting business, on the assumption that most users will just choose selling their data over a subscription. And if they go for a subscription, even better. In a sense, let the market decide the value of privacy.
The first step in this would obviously be killing any third party alternatives that would be the first place of refuge when they make that move.
In any case, a pet theory, but there's been a strange convergence by these big companies and the way they're changing their business models.
The subjective disagreement is that the trend/bubble towards more and more subscriptions is going to burst all of a sudden. From what I've seen in the mobile app world, it's now at least a 5-year trend towards more and more paid subscription apps being successful, more and more consumers willing to pay x$/month for things they wouldn't ever consider paying for before, etc. And yes, it's not billions of people, but you don't need billions of subscribers to run a successful business with subscriptions. And the same thing is happening with Patreon, Substack, even OnlyFans. And same as with mobile apps, so it is with creators, not all apps are worth the monthly fee, and not all creators are worth the monthly fee. The business model is not a revenue guarantee, it's a revenue possibility. And yes, as with any other solo business, it's extremely hard to stand out in blogging. You have to be a great writer, you have to know how to build an audience, and you have to consistently deliver that great writing to this audience. And there's about a few million other bloggers out there, with the same goal. There's no business model that's going to pay all of them well. But having the possibility of paying writers directly, simply and easily, is a very worthy evolution for the writer space. It's not going to save millions of bloggers/writers who believe the business model is the issue though.
The objective disagreement is that Substack is only successful due to having VC cash to throw at writers to come to their platform. Yes, they have VC cash, and they have offered great upfront deals to writers. But Scott Alexander wrote a good post on this subject, revealing the details of his deal (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-t...). Long story short, in basically all cases that he is aware of, his own and others, the deal that Substack offered was great, great enough to jump ship quickly, but in nearly all cases, the writer would have been better off not taking the deal, and just taking the usual Substack cut of the revenue offered to all writers, as the eventual subscriber revenue was bigger than the already big upfront deal.
That makes me think that even once the VC cash dries out, subscriber revenue is going to be a pretty good driver of the business going forward.
Is there a sensible argument why Spotify doesn't go this route? The only one I've heard is that music publishers hold too much power, and shifting more value onto the artists would threaten Spotify's core business by having publishers object to that shift.
Maybe someone from the industry can comment, it just never made sense how the music industry seems to be the slowest to embrace this shift into independence/patronage, while being the ideal industry for it, since it's all about fandom and the personal draw of an artist/band. Or that shift is happening, just not visible to us laypeople?